Foie Gras Lovers in California Fall Victim to Rights of Ducks

Foie gras, the delicacy known by its French name, is seen garnished with figs, stewed red onions and champagne grapes, at the Restaurant Gary Danko in San Francisco. Photographer: Kevin Thrash/Bloomberg

Sept. 7 (Bloomberg) -- Chef Gary Danko sears an inch-thick
slice of duck liver in a small pan in the San Francisco
restaurant where he earned a Michelin star until the meat
develops a golden-brown shell.

The delicacy known by its French name, foie gras, is
garnished with figs and champagne grapes, a variation on a dish
he’s served since opening Restaurant Gary Danko near Fisherman’s
Wharf in 1999.

“I sell probably 40 orders a night or more,” Danko said
in an interview while salting the meat. “When the protesters
are here, double that.”

The protesters are animal-rights advocates who say force-feeding ducks and geese to fatten their livers is cruel. Danko
and other California chefs will have to remove foie gras from
their menus in July, when the state becomes the first to ban the
dish, under a 2004 law.

At issue is the method of feeding the birds, with a tube
inserted in the esophagus.

“These birds have done nothing to deserve this fate of
being force-fed several times a day,” Paul Shapiro, a spokesman
for the Washington-based Humane Society of the United States,
said in a telephone interview. “It’s an inhumane practice that
should be relegated to the history books.”

Connoisseurs say the process mimics behavior in the wild,
where the birds gorge themselves before migrating. Foie gras
purveyors say the force-feeding causes no pain, and that
opponents are trying to impose the values of vegetarians on
everyone else.

Schwarzenegger Signed

The legislation, signed by then-Governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger and backed by celebrities such as Paul McCartney
and Alicia Silverstone, bans force-feeding of ducks or geese to
make foie gras and forbids selling foie gras produced that way.
Violators can be fined as much as $1,000 a day.

Some chefs say they plan to defy the ban, arguing that no
one should dictate what people can eat.

“When the ban comes in, we’re going to serve it every
day,” said Laurent Quenioux, a visiting chef at Starry Kitchen
in Los Angeles, who said he’s been cooking with foie gras for
about 25 years. “They can send me the foie gras police.”

The California law postponed enforcement of the ban for
almost eight years to allow producers to find an alternative to
force-feeding. No substitute method has come to light.

Guillermo Gonzalez, owner of Sonoma Foie Gras, California’s
only foie gras farm, did not respond to requests for an
interview. Hudson Valley Foie Gras and La Belle Farm, both based
in Ferndale, New York, are the only other producers of foie gras
in the U.S.

‘In Full Compliance’

“We are not contemplating changes to our production
methods because they produce a premium product that is in full
compliance with our federal regulators,” Allison Lee, a
spokeswoman for Hudson Valley Foie Gras, said in a telephone
interview.

The company, which has sales of $15 million and processes
250,000 ducks annually, is considering a legal challenge of the
California law’s constitutionality, Lee said.

“To have an entity regulated at the federal level
restricted at the state level creates an unfair trade
practice,” Lee said.

While California used to account for as much as 20 percent
of the company’s sales, Hudson Valley has shifted marketing to
other states to diminish the impact of the ban, she said.

PETA Protests

Animal-rights supporters are asking California restaurants
to stop serving foie gras now, without waiting for the ban to
take effect.

Lindsay Rajt, a spokeswoman for People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals in Los Angeles, said the group had success
in appealing to stop foie gras sales at restaurants including
those operated by California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom’s
PlumpJack Management Group LLC.

Thomas Keller, the chef who holds three Michelin stars for
the French Laundry in Yountville, California, and three for Per
Se in New York City, said he’s resigned to the ban.

“Foie gras is a product that we have enjoyed preparing for
our guests through the years and has been a regularly featured
item on our menu,” Keller said in an e-mailed statement. “But
we will certainly comply with the new foie gras ban law once it
goes into effect.”

Traci Des Jardins, chef and co-owner of Jardiniere, a
French restaurant in San Francisco, said she’d removed foie gras
from her menu and then restored it.

Fine Dining

“The feedback from my guests and diners is it’s something
that they really wanted,” Des Jardins said in a telephone
interview. “Foie gras is an attractive luxury food that people,
when they are going to a fine-dining restaurant, want the
opportunity to eat.”

“I think we need to get together and fight it,” Roland
Passot, the French-born owner and chef at Michelin-rated La
Folie in San Francisco, said in a telephone interview. “We eat
meat. We raise those ducks to be eaten. We don’t raise them to
become pets.”

Passot, who makes three foie-gras dishes, said he’d remove
them from his menu when the law takes effect.

“You have to obey the law, but you work around it,”
Passot said. “The foie-gras lovers will get their fix
somewhere, somehow. It’s going to be an underground thing.”

A duck foie-gras lobe, or entire liver, costs $99.99 per
1.85 pounds (0.84 kilograms) on average at D’Artagnan, a foie
gras distributor in Newark, New Jersey. Owner Ariane Daguin said
the industry has formed a group called the Artisan Farmers
Alliance and intends to fight the California law.

Overturn Ban

“We are looking right now at the different ways to
overturn that ban, encouraged by our success in Chicago,”
Daguin said in a telephone interview.

Chicago, the first city to outlaw foie gras in 2006, lifted
the ban in 2008 at the behest of Mayor Richard Daley.

In California, John Burton, former president pro tem of the
state Senate, said he introduced the legislation at the
prompting of animal-rights activists.

“If you ever see how they cram this food down the geese’s
necks, it just ain’t right,” said Burton, now chairman of the
California Democratic Party, in a telephone interview.

Emily Patterson-Kane, an animal welfare scientist at the
American Veterinary Medical Association in Schaumburg, Illinois,
said it’s hard to judge how distressing it is for the animals to
be fed by tube.

“We know that they are eating more food than they would
voluntarily choose to,” Patterson-Kane said in a telephone
interview. Ducks don’t have a gag reflex and have a more robust
esophagus than a mammal’s, “so they can gulp down relatively
large things,” Patterson-Kane said.

“It’s still probably unpleasant to some extent,” she
said.

Danko, the San Francisco chef, said he plans to follow the
law when it goes into effect.

“I’ll have to come up with a new menu item to fill its
void,” Danko said. “Many people will miss it.”